Category Archives: Reading Nature

Book reviews of guidebooks, natural history books and great wild writing.

Field Notes, Reading Nature, The Herbarium, Wanderlusting

Bitterroot

 

bitterootIt is the Bitterroot blooming time in Missoula. Their appearance signals the end of the harvesting season for these roots that were one of the main staples in the Native American diet in the region. The fleshy green shoots of rosettes began appearing on the rocky hillsides around town soon after the snow began to melt, beating out even the earliest flowers. The Native Americans traditionally dug the root in May, before the rosette withers away and the flower blooms, because afterwards the woody brown skin on the root is difficult to remove. Among the Flathead and Kutenai Indians of western Montana, a special ceremony honored the Bitterroot and opened the root and berry picking season. Early settlers reported great gatherings of Flathead, Kalispell, Pend d’Oreille, Spokane and Nez Perce tribes camped in the Missoula valley to collect the roots.

Lewis and Clark encountered the plant in the Big Hole Valley in 1805. Captain Lewis tried the boiled roots, finding them quite soft, but complained that they had a bitter, nauseating taste. The first time I tried the Bitterroot I too found them bitter, but I rather liked their astringent taste. Bitters have long been used as a way to stimulate the digestive juices and given the Native American’s meat heavy diet, I imagine that the roots were very beneficial.

Jeff Hart, in his priceless book Montana—Native Plants and Early Peoples recounts one of the origin stories of the plant: “Long ago, as the story goes, in what we now call the Bitterroot Valley, Flathead Indians were experiencing a famine. One old woman had to meat or fish to feed her sons. All they had to eat were shoots of balsamroot, and even these were old and woody. Believing that her sons were slowly starving to death, she went down to the river early one morning to weep alone and sing a death song. The sun, rising above the eastern mountains, heard the woman singing. Taking pity on the old woman, the sun sent a guardian spirit in the form of a red bird to comfort her with food and beauty. The bird flew to the old, gray-haired woman and spoke softly. ‘A new plant will be formed,’ said the bird, ‘from you sorrowful tears which have fallen into the soil. Its flower will have the rose of my wing feathers and the white of your hair. It will have leaves close to the ground. Your people will eat the roots of this plant. Though it will be bitter from your sorrow, it will be good for them. When they see these flowers they will say, here is the silver of mother’s hair upon the ground and rose from the wings of the spirit bird. Our mother’s tears of bitterness have given us food…’”

Even as a twenty first century white woman, when I see the blossoms of the Bitterroot, I feel a deep emotional connection to this mother’s story.  But more than that, I am struck by the world view this story illuminates.  The idea that the natural world is responsive to us in such an nurturing way is so different from our western view of nature being at best indifferent to us, or, at worst, if it does respond it is always in a violent, revengeful way (you shouldn’t fool with mother nature!)  What if nature really is both responsive and benevolent and interconnected to us in such an intimate way?  It certainly is worth further exploration and reflection.

Reading Nature, The Commonplace Book

Silent No More

bird skeletonbird skeleton“We stand now where two roads diverge.  But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair.  The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.  The other fork of the road—the one ‘less traveled by’—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth.
The choice, after all, is ours to make.  If, having endured much, we have at last asserted our ‘right to know,’ and if, knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accpt the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us.”  Rachel Carson, Silent Spring           

I have just finished re-reading Silent Spring, a book I have not picked up since I read it in college nearly 40 years ago.  At that time it was very controversial and I remember the way she was vilified for even suggesting that the brave new world—“better living through chemistry”—was not turning out to be the Eden the chemical and oil companies touted.  Re-reading it now I am horrified by how little has changed.  True, the book and Carson’s subsequent testimony before congress did have some positive impacts.  DDT was eventually banned in this country, though we still sell it overseas.  And she was one of the instigators of the broader environmental movement that was spawned at that time.  I have always looked to Carson as an inspiration, a shining example of what powerful writing can accomplish.  And yet…

And yet, fifty years later “only 200 of the more than 80,000 synthetic chemicals used in the US have been tested under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.  And exactly none of them are regulated on the basis of their potential to affect infant or child development.” Sandra Steingraber, Raising Elijah.  Coincidentally, just as I was finishing Silent Spring, Bill Moyers had Sandra Steingraber on and her book is the natural sequel to Carson’s.  Steingraber says, “(In Silent Spring Carson) posited that ‘future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life.’  Since then, the scientific evidence for its disintegration has become irrefutable, and members of the future generations to which Carson was referring are now occupying our homes.  They are our kids.”

Steingraber speaks of the moral crisis of our day being two-fold—the pollution of our bodies by toxic chemicals and the alteration of our climate through the accumulation of heat-trapping gasses.  Both of these crises are attributable to our economic dependence on fossil fuels.

After outlining the scientific evidence for her arguments, Steingraber presents a compelling case that it is the moral responsibility of all of us to not give in to “well-informed-futility-syndrome”, whereby knowledge about the enormity of a problem becomes incapacitating.  Instead we must scale up our actions to match the size of the problem.

I would love to sit back and focus all my time and attention to being a naturalist, to bearing witness to the incredible complexities of nature that abound in my backwoods and beyond.  I still believe, as I wrote last year in “New Language, New Way of Thinking” that observing and writing about nature in an effort to restore its sacredness as Jack Turner in The Abstract Wild,  “If we find we live in a moral vacuum, and if we believe this is due in part to economic language, then we are obligated to create alternatives to economic language…Emerson started the tradition by dumping his Unitarian vocabulary and writing “Nature” in language that restored nature’s sacredness.  Thoreau altered that vocabulary further and captured our imagination.  The process continues with the labor of poets, deep ecologists, and naturalists,” is a worthy enterprise, I am beginning to feel that it really isn’t enough.  Neither is changing out my light bulbs, driving less, or even growing and canning my own food.

I can’t just throw up my hands in despair, even if any action I take will be insignificant in the face of the power of the economic interests of the corporations.  I have to be able to look my children in the eye and not feel shame for my cynicism and cowardice.  And so, when I was asked to sign a petition stating that I was willing to be arrested to protest the Keystone Pipeline, I did.  You have to make a stand somewhere.  And stopping the pipeline and fighting the expansion of fracking in my own state is a place to start.  Faced with peak oil, the answer is not to find new and dirtier oil.  It is to begin to build an alternative to our fossil fuel economy.

I will still be exploring the backwoods and beyond.  But I will also be looking for ways I can keep myself from despair over the state of the world.  Reading both Silent Spring and Raising Elijah is good place to start.  I don’t want to leave my children a world with a silent spring, and so I can’t be silent any longer.

Reading Nature, The Herbarium, The Homestead, Woodscraft and Lore

Having My Cake and Eating it Too

      Today, while my husband prepares for his annual hunting trip, I am up at the homestead gathering.  As convenient as my garden is, right out my front door with its neat rows of produce ready for the picking, its domesticated flavors can’t compare to the wild tanginess of a berry foraged from the forest.  Half the experience of eating a huckleberry or spreading thimbleberry jelly over your toast is the memory of finding it–the day spent in the mountains taking careful notice of things, discovering not only the berries you were seeking, but stumbling upon the carefully built midden an industrious chipmunk has gathered against the winter snow.

I read recently that women are better suited to gathering than men.  It seems that we see colors more vividly than the guys and I wonder then, what the world looks like through their eyes, slightly less saturated, a bit duller perhaps.

Anyway, on this fine summer day I am gathering rosehips to dry in the sun–a winter’s bounty of vitamin C rich tea.  And of course, a few kept by to make a rose hip cake.  When the boys were little and we spent our summers rangering in Glacier Park, their favorite stories were the Broughton Bear books, by Susan Atkinson-Keen.  The main character was a little boy who lived in a cabin in the wild, just like my sons.  And the boy in the stories lived with a grandfatherly bear who took him out in the woods to share some natural history and gathering adventure which always ended in the preparation of food, recipe included.  Thus began our tradition of gathering the fat red rosehips to make a summer rich treat in the middle of winter.

ROSE HIP CAKE

2 cups dried rose hips
1 cup water
blob of butter
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup flour
1 tsp. baking powder

Cover and simmer rose hips in water for 20 minutes.  Strain to remove seeds, hairs, and pulp.  Set aside 1/2 cup of this juice with a blob of butter.

Beat eggs in large bowl.  Beat in sugar.  Add flour, baking poweder, and hip juice.  Mix well.  Pour into greased 8″x8″ pan and bake 25 minutes at 350 degrees.  Remove from oven.

Topping

3 tbls. butter
3 tbls. brown sugar
2 tbls. cream
1/2 cup sliced almonds

Mix topping in small pot and heat until butter melts.  Pour over cake, then brown slightly under the broiler.

Enjoy!

Cloudspotting, Field Notes, Reading Nature, The Backwoods

Cloud Spotting

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22 degree halo

 

While we wait for the flowers to come up, we can turn our eyes to the sky and indulge in another game of identification, Cloudspotting.  This example is a 22 degree halo seen in the Cirrostratus clouds.  This type of cloud is composed of a delicate layer of ice crystals and the halo is made by sunlight refracted by the crystals.  Cloudspotting can turn the most mundane trips around town into a real naturalist’s adventure and there are several books that can heighten the experience.

First is The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds by Gavin Prector-Prinney. He gives detailed descriptions of the different kinds of clouds and their subspecies, like the wispy Cirrus clouds or “mare’s tails” outside my window just now. It also includes interesting tidbits like the history of the meteorologists in Bergen Norway who first worked out the complex science of the development of rain clouds, and the Chinese scientist Zhonghas Shou who is using the appearance of certain cloud types as a short term earthquake predictor.

If you want to share this experience with kids, Tomie De Paola’s The Cloud Book is a great introduction. He describes the basic cloud types, mixing elementary scientific information with the mythology of clouds and the popular sayings that have been used for centuries to predict weather. “When the fog goes up the mountain hoppin’, then the rain comes down the mountain drippin’.”

To take your cloud spotting to the next level The Cloud Collector’s Handbook, also by Pretor-Pinney, gives you a field guide and a “birding list” in one. Each type of cloud you find and record is worth points. Living in Missoula it is easy to get 15 points for the Stratus that lay low in the valley on inversion days, and you can pick up another 5 points for getting above the clouds and seeing their undulating upper surface.

Very young children can join in the fun as well with Eric Carle’s Little Cloud, a great book for encouraging the age old game of spotting different shapes in the clouds.

Finally, check out www.clouds365.com where you can share your finds with this online cloud appreciation community.

This book review will appear in the Montana Naturalist Magazine, spring issue, put out by the Montana Natural History Center

Reading Nature

The Burgess Books

 

(This blog post originally appeared in the Connecting Children to Nature Through American Literature Blog at: www.http://childnatureamericanlit.blogspot.com/
Old Mother West Wind Blew Me Away – by Peggy Christian
When I was five years old my parents and I spent the summer in a tent at a remote Colorado gold mine.  Over the course of the summer my father read me all of Thorton Burgess’s books, starting with Old Mother West Wind and then on to Buster Bear, Reddy Fox, Jimmy Skunk, etc.  These were more than good bedtime reads to my father, they had been his childhood favorites.  Born in 1911, the same year Old Mother West Wind was written, my father eagerly awaited the publication of the next in the series.  He wanted to share with me the deep connection to the natural world these books had given him.
 Going back to the books fifty years later, having read them to my boys and then stored them in the attic for future grandchildren, I was surprised to see how well they stand up.  Yes, the language is dated, but they have a lovely oral storytelling quality that I’ve missed in some modern children’s stories.  And I know the anthropomorphism is very out of date—shunned by all enlightened writers of children’s books today.  Still, I would argue that instead of making children see animals as human, it engages their imaginations, encouraging them to relate to animals in a deeper way than most non-fiction books, which make us see the natural world as something to be studied and protected, but not something we are a part of.
Being an only child, there were no other kids to play with at our camp, but I never felt lonely because Chatterer the Red Squirrel greeted me (or scolded me—I was never sure), every morning.  And Paddy the Beaver lived just down the creek in the pond he’d built.  Every time I ventured near, he would slap his tail and scare me to death.
Burgess was a naturalist and conservationist and he based his animal’s characteristics on his own close observations of their behavior.  This encouraged me to watch as well.  After hearing the story of Sammy Jay, I sat out by the campfire observing the gray jays as they chattered in the trees and snooped around camp for any loose crumbs.
I also remember how Burgess named the places in the landscape of his stories—The Great Woods, The Green Meadow, The Smiling Pool and the The Laughing Brook.  I too named the places where I played– the creek with the wild watercress, Sandwich Creek, or the willow bushes by the pond Willow Cottage after I cut away a secret little den inside the tangle of branches.  My mother helped me draw a map and the woods felt like home.
Burgess encouraged his readers to engage imaginatively in the natural world.  In fact, he said that the imagination is “the birthright of every child.”  And I hope to do the same in the stories I write for children.